Facts About Space, Because Space Is Cool And I Have Nothing Better To Write

Space is really big. Beyond infinite, and still growing exponentially. It's impossible to count the stars in space-- scientists currently use the amount of stars in the Milky Way to estimate, and that number is 200-400 billion stars in the galaxy. With potentially billions upon billions of other galaxies in space, it's physically impossible to comprehend the amount of stars in space. 

Halley's Comet won't appear again until the year 2061. I will be 59 years old. 

Scientists may have found a planet made out of diamonds. A planet named 55 Cancri e may have a surface composed completely of graphite and pure diamond according to research done by scientists at Yale University. The planet is 400 lightyears away from planet Earth but shines in the constellation Cancer. 

The Andromeda Galaxy is approaching the Milky Way – where our solar system is – at rate of around 110 kilometres per second, and eventually the two will collide to form a giant elliptical galaxy.

In space, if two metals of the same kind touch each other they will permanently bond. This is called cold welding. It occurs because with nothing between the bare atoms, the two pieces have no way of knowing they aren't the same piece. This is impossible on Earth because there will always be air and water in between atoms. 

Astronomers have found a massive water vapor cloud which holds 140 trillion times the mass of water in the Earth’s oceans somewhere around 10 billion light years away – making it the largest discovery of water ever found.

On Venus, one day is longer than an Earth year. 

In space, the human spine straightens out since it is no longer being pulled down by gravity. You can become up to 1.97 inches taller in zero gravity. 

Space is closer than you think. Space officially begins at the universal marker of the Karman Line. This invisible boundary is 100km above the Earth. In theory if you could drive your car upwards, you could be in space in less than hour.

The core of a star reaches 288,000,000,32 degrees Farenheit. If a single grain of sand were that hot, it would kill someone from 93.2057 miles away. 

In the past twenty years, we've discovered over a thousand planets outside our solar system.

Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune could all fit in the space between Earth and the Moon.

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More than 1,300 Earths could fit inside of Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar sys

More solar energy reaches Earth’s surface in an hour and a half than we used in all of 2001.

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Astronomer Frank Drake proposed the Drake Equation to estimate how many civilizations could exist in our galaxy. The figure is in the millions!

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Astronauts left a mirror on the Moon’s surface during the Moon landing. Scientists used this mirror to reflect a laser beam which measured the distance between the Moon and the Earth with amazing accuracy.

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Scientists recently discovered a star that had been lost in the glare of a supernova for 21 years.

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The Sun is more than 300,000 times bigger than the Earth.

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The Sun’s surface temperature is around 5,500 degrees Celsius (9,941 degrees Fahrenheit).

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An object the size of Mars crashed into Earth 4.5 billion years ago.

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The Moon is very hot during the day but very cold at night: the average surface temperature of the Moon is 107 degrees Celsius during the day and -153 degrees Celsius at night.

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The Sun travels around the galaxy--a journey of 100,000 light years--once every 200 million years.

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A tablespoon of neutron star would weigh about ten billion tons.

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If you fell into a black hole, you would get stretched out like spaghetti.

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Venus is the hottest planet in our solar system with an average surface temperature of over 450 degrees Celsius.

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The Sun weighs 2,000 trillion trillion tons – about 300,000 times as much as the Earth – even though it is made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium, the lightest gases in the universe.

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Winds reaching up to 1,100 kilometers per hour--ten times stronger than the fastest recorded on Earth--swirl around Saturn’s equator.

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